Spike Lee's remake of Chan-wook Park's provocative revenge thriller hits theaters in just over a month. The film follows the story of Joe Doucette (Josh Brolin) a man who is abruptly kidnapped and held hostage for 20 years in solitary confinement...for no apparent reason. When he is suddenly released without explanation, he begins an obsessive mission to find out who imprisoned him, only to discover that the real mystery is why he was set free.

Screenwriter Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend) and co-stars Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos) and Pom Klementieff were on hand at today's New York Comic-Con for a panel featuring exclusive footage from the film. A procession of Oldboy geishas holding the yellow "countdown" umbrella featured in the poster below led off the affair.

At the top of the panel an extended trailer, which featured much of what we've seen in the previously released trailers, was screened. However, the footage did deliver a sense of the stylized aesthetic of the film, which in moments feels like a moving painting, as well as the tone, which is similar to a colorful, saturated and surreal nightmare.

The moderator then moved on to a general discussion of the intention behind the remake, which initially began as a collaboration between Protosevich, Steven Spielberg and Will Smith, and evolved into what it is today when Smith and Spielberg moved on from the project. Essentially, the writer had become attached to the material and pitched Spike Lee and Josh Brolin on it. Protosevich stressed repeatedly that they are all fans of the original, and that this work honors it, while bringing something new. He hadn't been as familiar from the Manga source, but did pull in some inspiration once he'd read it, including Imperioli's character, Chucky, a bartender and childhood friend of Brolin's Doucette.

He likened their film to a great musical cover, "Some covers are just duplications," the screenwriter said. "Or there are others that are just extreme version, where it’s completely changed. What you want is create something where you can identify the original but bring something of yourself to it." Protosevich went on to say that it would be silly to make a film this dark as a "cash grab," and that their Oldboy is just as psychologically "screwed up" and macabre as the original. The writer stressed that the team hadn't received any studio pressure to pull back on the violence or veer away from an R rating. "This isn't the WB or Fox," he explained, "they knew what film we were making." Adding that there was a, "real spirit of independence" on the project.

We got our first taste of said violence in an extended sequence which was screened. Be warned, if you don't want to know anything about the film, do not read on.

We open on Joe (Brolin) sitting in a local Chinese restaurant, a man comes in and picks up and extensive order. Joe follows the man into an ally and, without hesitation, wields a hammer and brutally dispatches him. Dispatches him right in the face, in fact. He then steals the delivery bike heading directly towards the hotel of horrors that had been his prison for 20 years. There is an enticing blend of humor and bloodthirstyness in the scene. Upon his arrival at his former hell hole, Joe, in quick succession, hammers the three henchmen working the front. One of them takes the back of the hammer right to the center of his skull - brutal. Here's where it gets really creative, though. Joe tracks down the hotel manager, played by a bleach-blond Mohawk-sporting Samuel L. Jackson who is waiting for the order to "feed the pets" - his "guests" who he observes coldly on a wall full of screens. You see a glimpse of how this plays out in the trailer. Let us assure you, that's not half of how gruesome it is. He draws lines across his former jailer's neck like an outline of death, then slowly proceeds to cut out piece after piece of skin. His plan, Jow tells Jackson, is to clip him apart bit by bit - until he can simply rip his head off himself...

Take a look at IGN's exclusive interview with Protosevich on creating a new Oldboy, stay tuned for Imperioli on Spike Lee's process.